CLIMATE CHALLENGESNational Opportunities to Remove Carbon Dioxide at the Gigaton Scale

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers, along with scientists from more than a dozen institutions, have completed a first-of-its-kind high-resolution assessment of carbon dioxide (CO₂) removal (CDR) in the United States. The report, “Roads to Removal: Options for Carbon Dioxide Removal in the United States,” charts a path for the United States to achieve a net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) economy by 2050, helping to ensure the nation’s climate security and resilience by cleaning up Earth’s atmosphere and addressing the root cause of climate change. It also includes an integrated analysis of CDR techniques and resources that are currently available, along with the costs that will be incurred on the path to net-zero.

In 2022, the United States government established a 2050 goal to reach net-zero emissions by decarbonizing our economy, removing CO₂ from the atmosphere and storing it at the gigaton scale (at least a billion tons per year). Roads to Removal lays out a road map to this goal and answers the question: How much CO₂ is it possible to remove in the United States and at what cost?

The report concludes that with today’s technologies, removing 1 billion metric tons of CO₂ per year will annually cost roughly $130 billion in 2050, or about 0.5% of current GDP. This will require increasing the uptake of carbon in forests and in working agricultural lands, converting waste biomass into fuels and CO2 and using purpose-built machines to remove CO₂ directly from the air. This ensemble of lowest-cost approaches for CO₂ removal would create more than 440,000 long-term jobs and can be achieved using renewable energy sources, with currently available land and below ground geologic storage. The granular analysis provided in the Roads to Removal report gives decision makers across the United States a lens for location-specific opportunities, enabling them to make decisions that best fit the places they call home.

Unique Approach Delivers Reliable Cost and Impact Estimates
The report provides a supply analysis built from measurements of economic feasibility and CDR technical potential with the highest-resolution data available. Unlike previous analyses, which used integrated assessment or top-down models, the methods used in Roads to Removal rely on bottom-up calculations, and use the most current estimates for resource demands, costs and impacts of potential CO₂ removal approaches by county.